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Saturday, October 13, 2012

a productive day

Today turned from a (possibly) depressed day to a good day when... I cleaned my bathroom. And here it is; I cleaned my whole bathroom, did it all at once, for the first time since I moved in, if not before that. That was a triumph for me. And I cleaned my guinea pig's cage (one of those tasks I tend to put off). And I took out my garbage. (Well, most of it.) And I washed, folded, and even put away my laundry. I was about to list what I haven't done, but that wouldn't be such a good idea, would it. It would be adding the "but" to my list of positives.

(My sister and I discussed this, how easy it is to add on to any telling of a good thing a negative "but ...." statement. "I'm good at music, but I hardly ever practice." "I'm academically gifted, but I'm getting a high B/low A instead of a high A this semester so far." "I had a good day, but I didn't do all my chores.")

So back to the positives, because I'm still not done telling them! I played a computer game that worked on my Spanish skills (I did it for fun, but - oops, that word - and it is educational, too). I listened to music by Mozart, Jaci Velasquez, and a country radio station. I listened to my week's lecture for my Intro to Audiology class and took the quiz for it and got 100% on that (now have a straight 90% in that class). I exercised at the gym. I practiced tap dancing at home. But here is the other big thing besides cleaning the bathroom: I got out my Human Anatomy lecture CD, Lab CD, text, and class guide (it is an independent study class), and learned the bones in the human axial skeleton (a whole lesson worth, though I had done some studying before on this), and started learning about bones in specific and what they are composed of, etc (about half a lesson worth). This is the class I got stalled on, so now I have it in motion again.

Now, back to yesterday's eating disorder topic, I have been enjoying donuts. But then, I checked my weight at the gym (I have no scale at home). And I was 1.6 pounds heavier than a week ago. Suddenly, my fear of eating too much is back. Suddenly, the "being a little heavier might be alright" changes to "being a little heavier might not be alright." Bother! Does it feel like OCD? A little. Does it feel like my fake conscience? Yeah. The urgency feels like my fake conscience. But what if I shouldn't have eaten that many donuts? Should I make a rule about how many donuts I can have? But that sounds a bit OCD-like. Basically, it feels like a can of worms. So maybe I'll just think about something else. And not eat any more donuts until tomorrow.

Here is something that half pleases me and half worries me. I don't know what my real conscience feels like anymore. Maybe because whenever my real conscience goes off, my fake conscience holds an amplifier to it, making it louder and less reasonable. A seed of correct conscience prick with an apple of fake conscience. I guess we could make that into a can of worms really quickly.

So maybe I'll go back to celebrating my accomplishments today. Or forward to washing dishes. Or forward to doing something fun before I go to bed (in addition to blogging, which I also enjoy).

That reminded me of another issue that has come up. I keep having suspense novel type dreams. This morning, (in my dream,) I was driving in the nearest big city (known for being semi-arid) when there was this big flood that washed away parts of roads and bridges. My car was buried in water (I think it was even salt water, too, which is remarkable for an inland city), but I made it to some safe place. I was rescued by helicopter. And eventually, I found out that my family made it home safely despite driving the roads around the same time. I guessed it was because they drove faster, enabling them to fly over more of the washed out road than I could with my slower, more cautious driving habits. Anyway, looking back, it is amusing. In process, it wasn't scarey. But it was, well, suspenseful? Like a good book you can't put down? And this has been happening morning after morning, different dreams each time. Fires one morning - that morning, I woke up too late to get to work on time, though thankfully not much later than that. A kid I was watching got lost in another dream. They aren't so much scarey as suspenseful. Which becomes problematic because I don't think I'm getting as restful a night's sleep, and I have trouble waking up.

So today I started a possible solution. I worked on a fiction story I was making up. Spent maybe an hour on it. Negative? The story was disturbing. More heart-wrenching than cheap suspense novel -style dreams. But here is the potential positive. When I was a kid, I was always making up stories. At some point, I squashed them enough that instead of making up stories, I'd start remembering dreams. So then there was a choice; make up stories in the day or dream at night. Maybe not quite one-to-one correspondence, but close enough for me to take notice. So I'm hoping that if I write fiction stories in the day, I will sleep better at night. Hey, it's worth a try.